For the past eight years, British reading and writing has been dominated by the memoir. Not the stuffy, vainglorious tale of the old soldier, statesman or actor, but the anxious, interior monologue of the private individual who, by and large, was not famous until he, or just as likely she, attempted to put themselves on paper.

Books such as Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father? from 1993 and Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (currently topping the paperback bestseller charts) are not studies in the making of greatness, but an exploration of how things went, if not wrong, exactly, then at least awry.

But there's a growing feeling that the memoir's hold on the literary market place has had a damaging effect on adjacent genres. Pieces of prose that in the 1980s would have been sent out into the world as novels have more recently been packaged as the Story of Me. Andrea Ashworth reports that for years she called the chunk of writing that would eventually become Once in a House on Fire 'the thing', because she wasn't sure whether it was fiction or autobiography. She was forced to choose only when a couple of early chapters appeared in Granta, and she had to decide whether to use an old family photograph to illustrate her account of an abused childhood in Seventies Manchester.

Ashworth is far from being the only young writer who, in another time, might have made her debut in fiction rather than autobiography. It is easy now to forget that Nick Hornby kicked off in 1992 with Fever Pitch, a factual account of his soccer-saturated youth, before transferring that sensibility (of the socially impotent young white male) to his first novel, High Fidelity. Tim Lott and Linda Grant likewise both started producing fiction only once they had found a voice by writing about themselves.

The strangest thing of all is that even where novels continue to get written, they've increasingly stolen memoir's clothes. These days the press releases that accompany first literary novels have a habit of stressing that the book draws on the author's own experience, as if this were an extra selling point instead of the way things usually are. Meanwhile the biggest-selling novel at the end of the past century masqueraded as that most basic building block of memoir, the diary. Much of the book's marketing, too, depended on blurring the life of the heroine, Bridget Jones, with that of the author, Helen Fielding, as if the novel were funnier, better, the further it got from make-believe.

Memoir could only have become the dominant mode of story-telling in the 1990s because fiction let it. The novel's experimentation with form, which had seemed so dizzying and necessary in the 1980s (Midnight's Children was more than a book, it was an event), started to seem tiresomely solipsistic 10 years on. With fictional narratives running into dead ends, the 'this happened and then this happened' of memoir offered nursery satisfactions.

And while in recent years literary fiction has seemed suspicious of the whole notion of character, memoir assumes that the excavation of personality is a valid endeavour. Memoir isn't naïve - it knows that the self is slippery - but it tries, at least, to get to the point where something, or someone, has been understood.

There are signs, though, that memoir's hold on the marketplace is over. Publishers are no longer commissioning it, believing readers to be bored by tales of 'my glandular fever hell'. Novel-writing has started to seem glamorous and valid once more. Zadie Smith, who stormed onto the literary scene last year with her debut novel, White Teeth, could so easily have written a memoir. Her experience of growing up black and smart in 1980s Willesden is exactly the kind of thing that we used to expect from literary fiction (remember Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit?) but have more recently been reading as autobiography. Smith's good looks and erudition (her story has the happy ending of a place at Oxbridge) would have made her life story a cinch to market. Instead Smith chose to write a sprawling, complex novel, teeming with stories other than her own.

The glamorous fuss that Smith's debut received should encourage young writers to consider the novel once more as the natural place to start a literary career. The long reign of autobiography provided a strong lesson in what readers want from a book: story, character, relationships, emotional engagement. Let's hope that in the future, instead of getting a strange thrill from the closeness of the author's life to the written tale, we will be marvelling at its distance from it. Hornby's new book is narrated by a woman. Ashworth's first novel, due next year, is set in New York. It is this kind of imaginative reach that we need now.